Kara E. Murphy | The Woodwork

(Article continued from part 6)

Recall the story of the enthusiast and the entry-level dSLR photographers trading cameras. While I admonished against the danger of buying too much of a dSLR, I glossed the obvious problem: the entry-level photographers had a problem shooting the professional dSLR. How do you get there from here?

The answer is simple: learning.

Inside every dSLR is a complex computer and that computer makes decisions for you. This is true in both the entry and pro dSLRs: the difference is the entry-level cameras are configured to make more decisions for you. The trick is to realize that the entry-level cameras give you access to the pro-level settings, but you have to be willing to leave the safety of automation in guides, scenes, and McDonald’s-style graphical menus.

I’m not a snob. There is nothing wrong with those features and the computer makes some pretty smart decisions. It’s just unless you are bumping your head against the decisions it makes, you’re limiting yourself in the sort of photography you can do.

Marie at The Corner The Corner, Mission, San Francisco, California Nikon D3, Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G, SB-800 1/20sec @ f/3.5 iso3200, 50mm This series had an inside joke. While it is a discussion of dSLR cameras, every photo was supposed to be taken with a non dSLR camera. Unfortunately, this photo is simply too difficult to be taken by anything other than a SLR. In this case, you can’t take this photo with the scene modes in your dSLR. Yes, the “night portrait” mode might get you close, but you’d need to pump the ISO even further, drag the shutter even more, change the white balance to incandescent, and set the flash curtain to front. If you mouseover the image, you’ll see the original. My camera broke and decided to only record in TIFF that day, so I couldn’t have even depended on the RAW mode safety net for dynamic range and white balance recovery.

Even if we restrict ourselves to discussion of the same composition in the same camera, we are still left with setting shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. These three have a complementary relationship and are associated with different tradeoffs. Scene modes in your camera make the decision for you, but unless you know what that decision is and when it is wrong, you can’t really grow as a photographer.

A plethora of learning materials exist out there. Here are a few of the ones I’ll be mentioning in this article.

Continue reading about books, videos, and classes after the jump →

Pages: 1 2 3 4

From a previous article, I finally found a way to work in Aperture again. But since I’m also trying to pick up photography again, I thought it’d be fun to write a little bit showing a few experimental images taken from that day.

This will be a way to test out a new WordPress plugin I just wrote to do mouseovers. As long as you’re on this blog article, you can run your mouse over the image to see the pre-processed original image.

The specials are… Mission Beach Cafe, The Mission, San Francisco, California Olympus E-P2, M. Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm 1:3.5-5.6 1/5sec @ ƒ3.9, iso 1600, 17mm (35mm)

I arrived a little late as usual, but just in time to order dinner with everyone else.

This was actually the first image I used to test out whether the workflow works. Because of that, the DNG output was 8-bit, not 16-bit. That may have accounted for the overaggressive smoothing, or it could be the lack of dynamic range in an ISO 1600 µ4:3 CMOS sensor (roughly 1/4 the size of a 35mm frame). Then again, maybe it’s the setting on Topaz Adjust plugin. In any case, it does have the painterly look that you get when you start remapping dynamic range of an image. Not too sure if I can still call this a photograph.

If you mouseover the image, you may be wondering how I pulled color from the black-and-white original. The original is the JPEG, but the image was generated from the RAW. For documentary photography, on cameras which resemble rangefinders like the Leica M8 and the Olympus E-P2, I prefer black-and-whites previews, which force me to concentrate on tone and not color—but it’s always nice to be able to grab the color channels from the RAW if I change my mind.

This exposure tests the outer-limits of the kit lens: 1/5 of a second at a borderline too-high-for-this-camera ISO at the largest aperture for this 35mm EFL. Had I my old 17mm pancake, I’d have gotten a full stop faster. Still, it got focus-lock and the in-body image stabilization allowed me to shoot handheld braced against elbows on the table. Yeah!

More photos in later pages…

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5